You may already work with a number of partners to communicate your brand to market. All of these partners will value the clarity a well considered Brand Strategy brings to what they do. It will make their job easier and the work they do more effective.

However the task of defining your brand and developing the right visual language (Brand Design) to communicate your brand to your audiences requires a specialist and specific skill-set. These parts of the process can only be effectively provided by an experienced, specialist Branding Agency.

Click here to view our Brand Design experience in detail.

In most cases a Branding Agency will charge higher rates than a graphic designer, especially for the initial work including the development of your brand strategy. This is the same case as with an industry specialists when compared to generalists.

However consideration should always be focused on value rather than price. There is little point is saving 30% if the end result fails to achieve it’s commercial outcome.

When developing the Brand Design for TOM Organic’s new packaging we developed a palette of brand visual language that communicated the brand strategy and it’s differentiated value proposition. The result for the business was an increase in sales of more than 1000% in the first six months after launch. Whilst we were the most expensive agency the client had worked with, the result proved us to also be the best value by a considerable margin.

Click here to read our case study on the Brand Design work we did for TOM Organic.

The design part of brand design requires a little more consideration, but over the course of a brochure or web design project for instance, the time frame is much the same.

If there is additional time required it is at the start of the project if a brand strategy does not already exist and is required to be developed as the first phase of the project.

We have always considered the ultimate success of a brand project to be the point at which the client has the understanding, belief and confidence to take the lion-share of brand communication on their own shoulders.

Over time, we like our clients to build an internal understanding of their brand and to have their team begin generating their own brand-led communications.

Brand design is the toughest ask of all the ways a brand communicates. However, for organisations with an internal design resource, directed by a comprehensive set of brand guidelines, this is not only possible but a probable outcome.

Not every organisation has the budget to employ brand designers to craft every single piece of their brand’s communication. In these cases we encourage you to employ Pareto’s 80:20 rule, which suggests 80% of the value will come from 20% of your brand communications.

When working with a medium-sized home building business we used this approach to successfully redirect their marketing budget away from highly competitive newspaper advertising and into a fresh and uncluttered brand communication channel giving them a much greater ‘bang for their buck’. You can read about our work with Nava Homes here.

To understand whether your organisation may benefit from investing in Brand Design, ask yourself these simple questions:
• Do we have an up to date and effective brand strategy?
• Do we have a specialist expert communicating that strategy through all we say and do?
• Do our staff have clear direction on what they should be consistently communicating in order to build our differentiated brand value proposition?
If your answer to these questions is either a ‘no’ or a ‘not sure’, you can confidently assume your business would gain considerable value from the Brand Design process.